Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Recently, the CBC rebroadcast Eleanor Wachtel’s Writers & Company interview with Zadie Smith originally broadcast in 2010 to coincide with the release of her book of essays, Changing My Mind. In the interview, she discussed views she had aired in some of her pieces, views which, in my estimation, have come to roost in her…
Learned By Heart is a historical novel that imagines the early years of the inimitable Anne Lister when she was a student at the Manor School in York and embarked upon her first love affair. The object of her love was Eliza Raine, a biracial orphan born in Madras (now Chennai) to an Indian mother…
It’s 2006 and David Dvornik is an American investment banker who lost his shirt in the Enron scandal. Of eastern European descent and something of a Russophile, he travels to St. Petersburg to clear his head. With vague plans to write some articles, he hails a cab to Kresty prison where he hopes to do…
I have ambivalent feelings about this novel. On the one hand, when critics treat Emily St. John Mandel as a literary novelist, I think she’s out of her depth. When her novel, The Glass Hotel, was nominated for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize, I observed that it was conspicuous amongst the nominees as the one…
I bought Grimmish at Word On The Street, recommended by one of the people manning the Coach House booth. Glad I followed the recommendation as the novel, by Michael Winkler, is well written, funny, with a self-deprecating humour that I found personally affecting. The premise is straight-forward. Set in the early years of the 20th…
I remember when Vincent Lam’s first novel, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, was published a few years back. At the time, Lam was practising emergency medicine and the book reflected experiences at medical school. It received a lot of press and won the Scotiabank Giller prize in 2006. I was otherwise occupied with foolish pursuits and…
The blurbs tell me Falling Hour is a novel. That depends on what you mean by a novel. If by novel you mean an extended stretch of writing through which the consciousness communicating with the reader (for convenience, let’s call this consciousness the narrator) is a person who doesn’t share the author’s name, then I…
Victory City is a novel about writing or, perhaps more generally, about creativity. No doubt, my opening statement is sweeping or over-broad or simplistic, but that’s how we do things nowadays, isn’t it? In fact, given its richness, Victory City is probably a novel about a lot of other things, too, but for the time being let’s pretend…
In an accompanying note to Haven, Emma Donoghue acknowledges that while she conceived of the novel before the pandemic, she executed it in the thick of things. While not explicitly a Covid novel, it nevertheless takes on features of the experience in tangential ways. We learn, for example, that one of the characters, a monk named…
In this, Ian McEwan’s umpteenth novel, we trace the life of Roland Baines, exact contemporary of Ian McEwan himself. While not of a particularly scientific cast of mind, Baines has over the years read the occasional book by popularizers of quantum physics and cosmology and finds in the paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat a useful way…
Late last evening (Nov 7th), judges announced this year’s winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize for Fiction. Before sharing the announcement, a couple housekeeping matters: First, I would recommend all the books on the short list. They are very different, one from another, and each has something unique to commend it. From Noor Naga’s playful,…
In 1959, Tibetans staged an uprising against the occupying forces of the Communist Chinese Party. In the words of just about any Star Wars movie, the imperial forces crushed the rebellion. With help from the CIA, the Dalai Lama fled the country and has lived in exile ever since. Among other things, the Chinese army…
The year is 1929 and Baxter is a young Black man working as a porter on Canada’s rail lines. Although, for many men in Baxter’s position, work as a porter is the best they can expect from life, Baxter aspires to more. For him, work as a porter is a means to an end; he…
Noor Naga, best known for her poetry, has written a novel that is a 2022 finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. I think it is relevant that she is a poet, as her poetics leak into her prose, giving it a compression and density that is sometimes dizzying. By that, I mean that her relatively…
Delphi is a Covid novel. We’ve read earlier novels that use Covid as part of the contextualizing furniture. Ali Smith’s Summer and Companion Piece both allude to the pandemic, but neither is what I would describe as a Covid novel because neither treats Covid as central to the story. But with novels like Sarah Moss’s…